Almost all judges of the Kyiv District Administrative Court, including its chief justice Pavlo Vovk and judges, who ruled the nationalization of PrivatBank illegal, failed to appear at a mandatory qualification session, claiming illness, Kyiv-based ezine Hromandske.ua has reported, citing the High Qualification Commission of Judges of Ukraine.

"Seven judges came, 34 were absent. Failure to appear for the appraisal without providing a reason is grounds for dismissal. However, the commission determined what happened to the missing judges: they all got sick on the same day and sent sick slips. The commission is not in a permission to revoke or check the sick slips. This explains what the reason is accepted, and for those judges a new day for appraisal has been scheduled," a member of the commission, the secretary for selection and public service Mykhailo Makarchuk, told the ezine.

According to Makarchuk, the judges have been rescheduled to appear on May 21.

A list of the judges who failed to appear was made public by a member of the public ethics council Roman Maselko.

As reported, Kyiv's District Administrative Court on April 18, 2019 proclaimed the nationalization of PrivatBank to be illegal, as demanded by Ihor Kolomoisky. The National Bank and the Finance Ministry said they would appeal the ruling after it was officially posted and insisted on the correctness of the privatization decision.

In the evening of April 18, Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko asked the heads of the Ukrainian Prosecutor General's Office and the Ukrainian Security Service at a session of the Ukrainian National Security and Defense Council to look into the possibility of holding the judges of Kyiv's District Administrative Court responsible for declaring that the nationalization of PrivatBank was illegal.

"I call on Ukraine's SBU State Security Service and [Prosecutor General] Yuriy Vitaliyovych [Lutsenko] after these necessary legal procedures have ended to look into opening a criminal case into the illegal ruling made by judges who made this ruling, without getting involved in analyzing the essence of the ruling," Poroshenko said.

The president also called for speeding up the appraisal of judges of the court.